Thursday, June 26, 2014

Guns Kill Twice as Many Kids as Cancer, and Swimming Pools Kill Ten Times as Many Kids as Guns

One of the constant wedge issue
conversations I get drawn into is gun violence and gun regulation. As an unabashed gun rights advocate I
definitely tend to end up siding with Conservative voices on this topic, but it
bugs me that this issue has been turned into a Left/Right issue when I don’t
think it is at all.

(As and aside: Every time I write or hear the phrase “gun
rights” my first response is a mental giggle and the thought “civilians aren’t
allowed to own artillery pieces.” I know
that the colloquial usage of gun refers to any projectile firearm using
explosives for propellant, but the military uses rather different
definitions. Definitions are important,
and advocates on both sides of the debate deliberately skew the meanings of the
words they use.)

With this entry I wanted to start
weighing in on the gun debate, but I have way too much to say on the topic to
encompass it all in a single post. So
this will be a topic that I will return to frequently. Not the least because it is inextricable from
a large number of related topics like violence, rights, self-defense, paranoia,
demonization (or otherization) of groups, racism, inequality, differing ways of
life, urban-rural divides, and a pronounced failure of our educational system
in this country.

The particular failure of our
educational system that I am going to focus on in this article is a lack of
understanding of statistics. This goes
right in hand with the lack of scientific literacy our educational system
produces. Now, I am not claiming to be a
statistical wiz, but I do want to promote a more critical attitude toward the
reading of statistics.

An excellent example of the
emotionally appealing, but misleading use of statistics is captured in an
anti-gun image that I saw recently. The
picture was of a little blond girl holding a stuffed animal and a revolver with the
caption “Guns kill twice as many kids as cancer.” This may be true. Since there was no source provided for the “statistic”
it is hard to directly evaluate, but we can simply accept that the number is
accurate for some given definitions of “guns,” “kids,” and “cancer.” But the image and caption itself are very
misleading, and so this blog entry is focused on looking at the idea that is
presented by the image and the reality of what the image is claiming.

This is a great example of a statement that is true, but misleading. Guns kill twice as many kids as
cancer… And swimming pools kill
ten times as many kids as guns! (at least during ages 1-4, after that it's
mostly cars). The appeal of the claim is emotional, because everyone knows that cancer
is a major killer in our society, so the idea that guns could be killing twice
as many kids as cancer is horrifying.
But childhood cancers are very rare.
The rate of childhood cancer in 2003 was 14.8 per 100,000. That equates to roughly 0.015% of children
get cancer. Of those children who get
cancer a little over 10% die. So let’s
call that a rate of 1.5 per 100,000, or a 0.0015% chance that a given child
will die of cancer. That would mean that
there is a 0.003% chance that an average child will die of a gun. That actually seems a bit low to me, but that
would be the claim made by the image. (Links for this paragraph below)

Now, what I said about swimming
pools is true. Swimming pools kill a lot
of kids. But the primary time that they
kill kids is when they are small. The
primary time that guns kill minors is when they are adolescents. If you make it 0-19 and include suicide with
a firearm and homicide with a firearm, then drowning kills half as many minors
as firearms. Firearms are even responsible for 3/4 as many deaths as cars for
0-19's and almost twice as many as SIDS. http://www.childdeathreview.org/nationalchildmortalitydata.htm

It makes it pretty
clear that being Native is probably the biggest risk for early death by
accident or suicide. And that by age 15 death by homicide is a third as likely
as all forms of accidental death for all groups, which is very scary. The sheet
doesn't include ethnicity info for homicide unfortunately, but if it did that
would also tell a very sad story.

The issues
facing Natives are also true in Canada, but in Canada the difference between
native and non-native rates is even more striking. Since Native rates in Canada are comparable
to the rates for Natives in the US, but not for non-natives. For the rest of Canadians rates of death from
accidents and homicide are way lower. I was a little surprised while watching
the news this week in Canada that alcohol related driving deaths in Canada are
1/20 of the US, even though Canada has 1/10 the population. Even when it comes
to drunk driving Canadians do twice as well as the US.

If you
break it down by mechanism it's even more dramatic. If you're young and white
you're twice as likely to die of firearms than knives or other means, if you're
Native chances are about even for guns and other forms, but if you're black you
are 1125% more likely to die of gun violence than other forms of homicide. http://www.cdc.gov/.../you.../stats_at-a_glance/hr_male.html

Here is an
interesting article. Even though homicide is at one of the lowest historical
rates in the US the reduction in homicide has not been uniform. Reduction in
gun homicide has been slower than for other mechanisms, slower for males than
females, and slowest for blacks. So if you are a white female you are safer
from being stabbed or beaten to death than ever, but if you are a black male
then you're shit outta luck http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6227a1.htm

So when we look at the image that
inspired this post, the image is of a little blond girl. It suggests that little white girls are in
serious danger from guns. But the
statistics do not bear that out. One can
assume well-meaning behind the use of a white girl and suppose that the idea
was simply to present a child of the majority ethnicity when talking about gun
deaths. Or one could take a more cynical
view and assume that the person who made the image assumes that people are not
going to react as strongly to an image of a black boy.

I’ll write more on this topic, but
this is a start. This entry is already
too long and rambling. I’ll try to write
more focused entries going forward.

2 comments:

Very nice opening entry into the topic. I think your statistical angle is a vital component often ignored in too many discussions on the issue. Of course, the gun rights issue has been weighing on my mind lot lately and particularly the way it seems each side attempts to reduce their positions to, at best, misleading propaganda. I look forward to reading more of your thoughts on this.

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